Does the eye of God, seeing all,
see the eye of God seeing all?
And see the eye of God
seeing the eye of God
seeing the eye of God, seeing all,
and so on, and on, and on? Could it be
that this conveyor belt of divine apperceptions
is the ring binding universes
numberless as Buddha’s lotus petals
in the great flat folder of a phrase
like multiverse; or, infinity of infinities…?

Ask Berkeley; he was – in some senses – Irish,
and may therefore have had the word-web wherewithal
to spin out of himself,
of his multi-layered, many-rooméd
book-of-Kells of a mind
the teletypic Molly-Bloomian infinity of Yes
it would take to spend eternity
affirming such a hall-of-mirrors God.
And hadn’t he – let alone Jehovah –
better things to be doing –
drinking tar-water, maybe,
thus bolstering the ubiety
of trees in empty quads…?
Ah, ubiety: the bird in all our hands;
the sure-thing we’ll all wager Heaven on –I know I see these eye-blue, more than sky-blue flowers
of the borage here before me,
know as well as any Cartesian bore
I’ve tasted them before
in salads, and Summer lemonade;
know they taste of their colour
just as roses smell of theirs; their shading, shape,
small breeze-rilled rocking motion
are upside-down in the back of my eye
for moments so small they’re indivisible,
and then enter the mind that thinks of itself as me –
and still, I am an unreflective
un-God. There’s no infinity of Toby
outside first-year philosophy; the countless lotus petals
open only to let me see
that I am that I am – the mere miraculous act of seeing.
Like the soul that is sole, divinity
reveals itself in puns –
since standing up upon the wide Savannah of this earth
Man is self-same with vision. Esse es percipi –
what other meaning of I could there be?

About Toby Sime

Toby Sime endures amongst his spawn in Daylesford. He began writing poetry at eight years old, eventually proving incorrigible. Several worthy journals owe their anonymous extinctions to his efforts; recently he has been contributing short stories (see Australian Love Stories, Inkermann and Blunt, 2014) - further extinctions are expected.